The 3 types of remarketing you should be trying

When creating your remarketing audience in Google Analytics, it’s all too easy to slap together an “All Users” audience, or take it one step further to “All Users (exclude converters).” But what are you missing out on when this is the extent of your remarketing efforts?

Following are three very tangible methods you can use in your AdWords account to make your remarketing efforts more effective.

Bring users back for conversions

In all likelihood, this is what you are using remarketing for: to target users who have visited your website, or specific pages on your website, with ads to bring them back to convert. If you are not currently doing any remarketing, this is where you should get started, as you’ll see the biggest impact from using remarketing this way.

If you have a low-traffic website (here defined as under 5,000 sessions per month), you can get away with a very general remarketing audience that does simply target All Users, or All Users and exclude sessions with conversions greater than 0. But when you have a higher-traffic site, you have to be more creative.

One smart tactic is to create different remarketing audiences based on specific pages that users have visited. Let’s say you have the following pages: Home, 10 product pages, Contact, About Us and Blog. A user who visited the Contact page (low-funnel, close to decision) clearly are in a different stage of the decision-making process than the user who visited your blog (high-funnel, investigating and gathering information), so we need to treat these users differently in remarketing.

Instead of sending both of these users to the home page, try sending the Contact visitor to a landing page designed specifically for conversion. Sum up your best content there in sections with a call to action under each section, and give them every piece of information that may have kept them from converting in their last visit. The Blog visitor is further back in the funnel; if you want contact info from them, you should send them to a lead magnet like a white paper or a video series they can opt into.

Upsell current customers

Often, your best audience for generating additional revenue can be the people who have already agreed to give you some. We typically use email campaigns or rely on our current customers to navigate back to our site to see new product or offers, but why not use remarketing to make sure they are seeing the message we want them to?

The obvious limitation here is that we still need the user to have visited our site in the last 30 days to be in our audience, but this is just a minor setback. The more traffic your site has, the more creative you can be. (If you have users coming to your site frequently to log in, you are in an especially good position.)

Here are two simple remarketing use cases you should be executing if they apply:

Introduce a new level of service/subscription that is higher-priced.

If users bought product A, remarket related product B (similar to introducing the product while they are buying).

Inform & retain customers

It can be hard to get current customers to engage with your content, some of which is likely designed specifically for them so they can make better use of your products/services. We dedicate so much time and energy to creating content and getting it out there, but doing everything we can to get it seen is the next step.

Typically, we use social media and email to drive customers to our content, but using remarketing can open up another method for getting customers to engage. If your content is showing up in your email marketing, on your website, in your social media account, and in the Google Display Network, you’re going to be in a good place.

Giving your customers all the assets they need to make good use of your product/service will ensure they come back, so you can keep them in your remarketing audiences.

By diversifying your usage of remarketing, you will see a few things happening: you will get more interaction from your current customers who may be ignoring your emails, and you’ll develop a better understanding of the nuances of remarketing, creating very specific audiences and sending them to pages based on their previous interactions with your brand. Have fun and use your remarketing powers for good.

Bonus Tip: Use Advanced delivery to get remarketing ads showing to new users in your audience as soon as possible.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

With 2 years of experience in paid media, Brett Middleton is responsible for strategy and execution at Snap. Hobbies include surviving Minnesota winters and beer sampling.